Building the brand of ‘you’ online is something of an art. Maintaining the niche you carved out for yourself takes dedication and focus as you continue to grow within your respected discipline. And of course, you want to develop and maintain a congruent brand in your offline world as much as your online world.
This includes things such as ensuring that your social profiles online are congruent with your offline material. It also can involve your business cards and even the clothes you wear, making sure they represent and portray you in a way that you want to be viewed.
But once you have your branding organized and you are out marketing from different media outlets, stages and platforms, how do you maintain the relationships of all of the people that you’ve met in your quest to build your brand?
Personalized SMS Text Message Marketing
If this is your first time hearing about using SMS marketing to build your brand, then you will be pleasantly surprised to hear about the ways you can further engage with your audience.
According to Frost and Sullivan, the open rate for SMS messages is as high as 97%, considerably higher than through email marketing.
Another amazing reality is that, as a society, people have officially been inducted into the mobile era.
This represents an incredible opportunity to connect your audience with your brand. There has never been anything quite like this in the history of marketing and advertising.
Marketers from centuries ago couldn’t have imagined the direct contact that we now have access to.
But how can this benefit you in your own personal branding?
To put this into context, as someone who is trying to build their personal brand, a major goal is to get more people to attend events that you are offering, such as seminars, conferences, or webinars.
SMS marketing allows you to increase the amount of people attending these events you are holding. The ability to send out a text message an hour before your event can drastically increase the amount of people that will actually attend the webinar. That means more people seeing you and your message, and ultimately more exposure to your brand.
Text marketing is particularly powerful because many webinars happen at night, and events on the weekends. This means that people may not be sitting in front of their computers just checking their email. However there is a high likelihood that they do have their phone on them. This simple event strategy can easily increase your attendance by up to 312%.
Take that a step further and now you can personalize your text messages with your subscriber's first name, last name, birthday and other fields to create a highly customized message to each subscriber.
"Hey Chris, thanks for signing up for our text alerts. Here’s a special gift for joining our exclusive list [link]"
Since text messaging is so personal, treating it as such is critical to its success. Treating text messaging as another "marketing" channel can and will hurt you. You need to treat your messages as personal texts from you, your company, mascot, or whomever. Blasting your contacts can quickly ruin a relationship.
Giving SMS text message marketing a try is a wonderful idea when you are trying to increase your engagement with your current customers, fans or colleagues—and can be another effective touch point in your personal brand development.
This blog was guest written by Brett Burky from Call Loop and Greg Rollett from the ProductPros. Call Loop is an easy, integrated, automated voice and text messaging system and the ProductPros helps authors, speakers, entrepreneurs and small business owners create more freedom in their business through direct marketing and leveraging information. Learn more about SMS Marketing at callloop.com and about monetizing your information at productprosystems.com.
[Image: Flickr user Deni]